Drew's Blog » Fedora 12

HowTo Setup Authenticated Postfix

Drew Dahl — Sun, 16 May 2010 00:54:01 +0000

I recently had the experience of setting up Postfix. It works really well, in my opinion; however, setting it up wasn’t the simplest for what I wanted. But, at least it was simpler than sendmail

Reading through several articles on the Internet, everyone was giving steps on how to setup postfix to handle e-mail for any FQDN (Fully-Qualified Domain Name). Well, we don’t want to be handling someone else’s e-mail, so we decided to set it up with authentication. All of the guides on setting up Postfix with SASL authentication are great and all; however, they don’t address the issue of, what if you want to receive mail as well. That’s a simple fix, but moreover, what if you have a service like mailman running? Mailman isn’t easily configured to authenticate against the SMTP server to send mail. So, the following are the configurations that I’ve come up with to solve all of these problems:

For the file /etc/postfix/main.cf

queue_directory = /var/spool/postfix
command_directory = /usr/sbin
daemon_directory = /usr/libexec/postfix
data_directory = /var/lib/postfix
mail_owner = postfix
myhostname = hostname.domain.tld
mydomain = domain.tld
myorigin = $mydomain
inet_interfaces = all
inet_protocols = all
mydestination = $myhostname, localhost.$mydomain, localhost, localhost.localdomain, $mydomain
unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 550
mynetworks = 192.168.0.0/24, 127.0.0.1/32
relay_domains = $mydestination
smtpd_sasl_auth_enable = yes
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks, permit_sasl_authenticated, reject_unauth_destination
broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes
alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases, hash:/etc/mailman/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases
recipient_delimiter = +
debug_peer_level = 2
debugger_command =
PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin
ddd $daemon_directory/$process_name $process_id & sleep 5
sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail.postfix
newaliases_path = /usr/bin/newaliases.postfix
mailq_path = /usr/bin/mailq.postfix
setgid_group = postdrop
html_directory = no
manpage_directory = /usr/share/man
sample_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix-2.6.5/samples
readme_directory = /usr/share/doc/postfix-2.6.5/README_FILES

Now keep in mind, your values for some of the above WILL be different. This configuration is on a machine that’s running mailman as well (thus the /etc/mailman/aliases file).

And lastly, for SASL auth, edit the file: /usr/lib64/sasl2/smtpd.conf

pwcheck_method: saslauthd
mech_list: plain login

Your lib64 directory may just be lib, depending on the architecture of your box. All of these edits were made a 64-bit Fedora 12 machine, but they should work for every machine.

And last note. After all of the edits have been made, make sure to restart postfix and restart saslauthd with the following:

/etc/init.d/postfix restart
/etc/init.d/saslauthd restart

For questions on what some of the postfix settings mean, you can check out one of the following:

postconf man-page by running “man postconf” or visit http://www.postfix.org/postconf.5.html

Postfix Documentation at: http://www.postfix.org/documentation.html

Postfix HowTo’s at: http://www.postfix.org/docs.html

Postfix is definition the easiest MTA I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with, as far as configuration goes. I hope this helps

DBDesigner 4 on Fedora 12

Drew Dahl — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:46:07 +0000

I found this very useful article on running DBDesigner 4 on Fedora 8, here. I followed the directions and found it to work on Fedora 11 and Fedora 12. I’m sure it’ll work for just about any distro, so I’m just reposting the directions here as I find it to be a very useful program.

Do not use the original DBDesigner4 download available on the fabForce.net website. Instead download the dbdesigner-fork package from here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbdesigner-fork/

Once you have unpacked it. Edit the bin/startdbd_using_kernel2.6 script and remove the assume kernel 2.4.1 text:

Original file contents: LD_ASSUME_KERNEL=2.4.1 LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork

Edited contents: LANG=en_US.ISO8859-1 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./Linuxlib/ ./DBDesignerFork

Save it and run it. It should all work as expected on Linux Fedora 8 or indeed any other modern distribution like Ubuntu, etc.

Fixing The Error: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery

Drew Dahl — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 19:06:06 +0000

If you get a message similar to this:

[username@localhost ~]$ sudo yum update
rpmdb: Thread/process 2402/139688794072832 failed: Thread died in Berkeley DB library
error: db4 error(-30974) from dbenv->failchk: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery
error: cannot open Packages index using db3 - (-30974)
error: cannot open Packages database in /var/lib/rpm
CRITICAL:yum.main:

Error: rpmdb open failed

You can fix it by running the following 3 commands:

[username@localhost ~]$ sudo rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
[username@localhost ~]$ sudo db_verify /var/lib/rpm/Packages
[username@localhost ~]$ sudo rpm --rebuilddb

Fedora 12!

Drew Dahl — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:56:42 +0000